What is SharePoint? Organizations use Microsoft SharePoint to create websites. You can use it as a secure place to store, organize, share, and access information from any device. All you need is a web browser, such as Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox.
Access Services: Access Services is a means for building SharePoint applications using the Microsoft Access database management system. The applications created using Access Services become accessible in a Web browser.
Microsoft is pointing SharePoint Online users of Access Services to instead build their applications using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. PowerApps is Microsoft’s template-driven application creation solution, while Microsoft Flow is a workflow automation creation tool frequently compared to the IFTTT mashup service.
Excel Services: Excel Services is a service application that enables you to load, calculate, and display Microsoft Excel workbooks on Microsoft SharePoint. Excel Services was first introduced in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
By using Excel Services, you can reuse and share Excel workbooks on SharePoint portals and dashboards. For example, financial analysts, business planners, or engineers can create content in Excel and share it with others by using an SharePoint portal and dashboard—without writing custom code. You can control what data is displayed, and you can maintain a single version of your Excel workbook. There are four primary interfaces for Excel Services:
- An Excel Web Access web part, which enables you to view and interact with a live workbook by using a browser
- Excel Web Services for programmatic access
- An ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) object model for automating and customizing, and to drive the Excel Web Access control and help build more compelling, integrated solutions as well as the ability to user user-defined functions to extend the ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) object model
- A Representational State Transfer (REST) API for accessing workbook parts directly through a URL
By using Excel Services, you can view live, interactive workbooks by using only a browser. This means that you can save Excel workbooks and interact with them from within portal sites.You can also interact with Excel-based data by sorting, filtering, expanding, or collapsing PivotTables, and by passing in parameters; this provides the ability to perform analysis on published workbooks. You can interact with a workbook without changing the published workbook—which is valuable for report authors and report consumers.Excel Services supports workbooks that are connected to external data sources. You can embed connection strings to external data sources in the workbook or save them centrally in a data connection library file.You can also make selected cells in worksheets editable by making them named ranges (parameters). Items that you choose to make viewable, when you save to Excel Services, appear in the Parameters pane in Excel Web Access. You can change the values of these named ranges in the Parameters pane and refresh the workbook. You can also use the portal’s filter web part to filter several web parts (Excel Web Access and other types of web parts) together.However, you cannot use Excel Services to create new workbooks or to edit existing workbooks. To author a workbook for use with Excel Services, you can use Microsoft Excel 2013.
Excel Services also has a Web service. You can use Excel Web Services to load workbooks, set values in cells and ranges, refresh external data connections, calculate worksheets, and extract calculated results (including cell values, the entire calculated workbook, or a snapshot of the workbook). In SharePoint, you can also save, save a copy, and participate in collaborative editing sessions by using Excel Web Services.
Business Connectivity Services: The Business Data Connectivity (BDC or BCS) service application in SharePoint enables us to connect and manipulate with external line of business data sources such as SQL Server, web services, WCF Service, SOAP, REST Service Connection, XML file connection, oAuth and other proprietary data sources that are accessed by custom .NET assemblies from SharePoint. Using BDC, you can use SharePoint and Office clients as interfaces with data that doesn’t live in SharePoint. External content types are the core of BDC, It interacts with data through external content types which allows the interaction with external data in SharePoint lists.
Machine Translation Service: Machine Translation Service is a new service application in SharePoint that provides automatic machine translation of files and sites. When the Machine Translation Service application processes a translation request, it forwards the request to the Microsoft Translator cloud-hosted machine translation service, where the actual translation work is performed. This cloud-service also powers the Microsoft Office, Lync, Yammer and Bing translation features.
Managed Metadata Service: Metadata is information about information. For example, a book’s title and author is metadata. Metadata can be many kinds of information — a location, a date, or a catalog item number. When you use SharePoint products, you can manage the metadata centrally. You can organize the metadata in a way that makes sense in your business and use the metadata to make it easier to find what you want.
User Profile: The User Profile service stores information about users in a central location. It enables My Sites, social computing features such as social tagging and newsfeeds, and creating and distributing profiles across multiple sites and farms. It is also required by most SharePoint hybrid scenarios.
The User Profile service application in SharePoint Server provides a central location where service administrators configure and administer the following features:
- User profiles– contain detailed information about people in an organization. A user profile organizes and displays all of the properties related to each user, together with social tags, documents, and other items related to that user.
- Profile synchronization– provides a reliable way to synchronize groups and user profile information that is stored in the SharePoint Server profile database together with information that is stored in Active Directory Domain Services.
In SharePoint Server 2013, you can synchronize directly with other directories across the enterprise.
In SharePoint Server 2016, you can synchronize with other directories by using an external identity manager such as Microsoft Identity Manager 2016. - Audiences– enables organizations to target content to users based on their job or task, as defined by their membership in a SharePoint Server group or distribution list, by the organizational reporting structure, or by the public properties in their user profiles.
- My Site Host– a dedicated site for hosting My Sites. A My Site Host is needed in order to deploy the social features of SharePoint Server.
- My Site– a personal site that gives users in your organization a central location to manage and store documents, links, and information about colleagues.
- Social tags and notes– enables users to add social tags to documents, to other SharePoint Server items, and to other items, such as external web pages and blog posts. Users can also leave notes on profile pages of a My Site or any SharePoint Server page. Administrators can delete all tags for employees when they leave the company or remove a tag they do not want.
These features make it possible for users in an organization to share information and to stay informed about what happens within the organization. Social tags, for example, enable users to tag and track the information in which they are most interested. Users can be alerted when people with which they work author new blog posts or when there is a change in organizational metadata.
Like other service applications in SharePoint Server, farm administrators can delegate the administration of all or part of the User Profile service application to one or more service application administrators. This enables the User Profile service application to be managed by the appropriate business group. One administrator can manage all areas of the User Profile service application or areas can be isolated and managed by different administrators. For example, one administrator can manage My Sites while a different administrator manages social tags and notes. The User Profile service application can be restricted and made available only to certain departments or sets of sites based on business need, security restrictions, and budgets.
User profile databases
When you create a User Profile service application, SharePoint Server creates three databases for storing user profile information and associated data:
- Profile database– used to store user profile information.
- Synchronization database– used to store configuration and staging information for synchronizing profile data from external sources such as the Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).
- Social tagging database– used to store social tags and notes created by users. Each social tag and note is associated with a profile ID.
Active Directory Import:
- One way of import, you can’t export values to AD
- It’s Fast then FIM’s two-way sync
- Easy to configure.
- You can schedule incremental every 5 min.
- You can Apply the LDAP Filters to exclude the users from importing.
- You can select which OU you want to import.
But you can’t import the Complex AD attribute with AD Import i.e Profile Picture.
If you want to import Profile picture then UPA Sync is the option.
- It imports non user objects as well, like computer accounts.
- If you have an OU which has both Computer & Users objects, then both are imported in UPA. However this is not the case with FIM based synchronization
- If you select only few users under an OU, then import process does not bring in those users to UPA. It only imports all users in an OU & whole OU has to be selected.
SharePoint 2013 /2016: Active Directory Import and known behaviors
SharePoint 2013 : ADImport is not cleaning up User Profiles in SharePoint whose AD Accounts are disabled
Search Service Application:
Listed below are the six components available in SharePoint 2013 search service:
- Crawl Component
- Content processing component
- Indexing component
- Query processing component
- Analytics processing component
- Search administration component
Now, let’s take a look on all these components separately …
1.Crawl Component :
This component takes care of crawling the content sources such as (SharePoint sites, websites & file shares etc…) and extracts the crawled properties and metadata and sends that to the content processing component.
- Content processing component:
This component receives the information from the crawl component and then processes and sends it to the indexing component. It also interacts with the analytics processing component and is responsible for mapping crawled properties to the managed properties.
- Indexing Component :
This component takes care of receiving the information from the content processing component and writes it to the search index. It also takes care of handling the queries and sends back the results to the Query processing component.
- Query Processing Component:
This component handles incoming query requests and sends them to the indexing component for results. It also takes care of query optimization.
- Analytics Processing Component :
This component takes care of analyzing what users are querying on and how they interact with the results. This information is used to determine relevance, generate recommendations and also used for generating search reports.
- Search administration Component:
This component manages administrative processes as well as changes to the search topology, such as adding or removing search components and servers.
Please note that these 6 search components can be distributed across multiple servers to provide high availability as well as improve performance as shown in the image below.
Search service application databases:
- Search Administration database :The Search Administration database hosts the Search service application configuration and handles crawl state orchestration, including the content source crawl history.
- Analytics Reporting database :The Analytics Reporting database stores the results for usage analysis reports and extracts information from the Link database when needed.
- Crawl Store database :The Crawl Store database stores the state of each crawled item and provides the crawl queue for items currently being crawled.
- Link database :The Link database stores the information that is extracted by the content processing component and the click through information.
Secure Store service Application: The Secure Store Service is an authorization service that runs on SharePoint Server. The Secure Store Service provides a database that is used to store credentials. These credentials usually consist of a user identity and password, but can also contain other fields that you define. For example, SharePoint Server can use the Secure Store database to store and retrieve credentials for access to external data sources. The Secure Store Service provides support for storing multiple sets of credentials for multiple back-end systems.
- Excel Online in Office Online Servercan use Secure Store to provide access to external data sources in workbooks published in SharePoint Server 2016. This can be used as a substitute to passing a user’s credentials to the data source, a process which often requires configuring Kerberos constrained delegation.
- Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2013can use Secure Store to provide access to external data sources in published workbooks. This can be used as a substitute to passing a user’s credentials to the data source, a process which often requires configuring Kerberos delegation. Excel Services requires Secure Store if you want to configure an unattended service account for data authentication.
- Visio Servicescan use Secure Store to provide access to external data sources in published data-connected diagrams. This can be used as a substitute to passing a user’s credentials to the data source, a process which often requires configuring Kerberos constrained delegation. Visio Services requires Secure Store if you want to configure an unattended service account for data authentication.
- PerformancePoint Servicescan use Secure Store to provide access to external data sources. PerformancePoint Services requires Secure Store if you want to configure an unattended service account for data authentication.
- Power Pivotrequires Secure Store for scheduled refresh of PowerPivot workbooks.
- Microsoft Business Connectivity Servicescan use Secure Store to map the user’s credentials to a set of credentials for an external system. You can either map each user’s credentials to a unique account on the external system or you can map a set of authenticated users to a single group account. Business Connectivity Services can also use Secure Store to store certificates for accessing an on-premises data source from SharePoint in Microsoft 365.
- SharePoint runtimecan use Secure Store to store credentials necessary to communicate with Azure services, if any of the user apps require SharePoint runtime to provision and use Azure Services.
The Security Token Service is not available (SharePoint Server)
Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig
Welcome to My World 